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Cricket 24: The Official Game of the Ashes - PS4

Cricket 24: The Official Game of the Ashes – PS4

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“Cricket 24 is the culmination of a decade of Cricket video game development and includes teams from every corner of the globe. Players will be able to take on major cricket nations including Australia and England in the official Ashes, West Indies, New Zealand, Ireland and more, plus for the first time ever, professional Indian T20 teams, all set in over 50 detailed official …
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Awards

Rating

  • Graphics
  • Multiplayer
  • Story (Career Mode)
  • Originality

You Might Like

  • Solid gameplay
  • Lots of licenses
  • Extremely accessible and customisable

Might Not Like

  • Dated Graphics
  • Glitchy
  • Simple career mode
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Description

"Cricket 24 is the culmination of a decade of Cricket video game development and includes teams from every corner of the globe. Players will be able to take on major cricket nations including Australia and England in the official Ashes, West Indies, New Zealand, Ireland and more, plus for the first time ever, professional Indian T20 teams, all set in over 50 detailed official stadiums. Cricket 24 is the most complete video game simulation of cricket seen to date.

Cricket 24: Building the most realistic cricket video game ever!

The Ashes
Cricket 24 will feature the biggest rivalry in cricket, The Ashes. Detailed cutscenes immerse the player in the moment as the Ashes tour progresses. Feel a part of the team with press conferences and team training sessions. Unique commentary allows for complete Ashes immersion. Experience The Ashes playing as a single player, or as Australia or England.

Official Licenses
Over 300 players with full photogrammetry. Major Cricket Nations including Australia, England, West Indies, New Zealand and Ireland plus more. The biggest tournaments including The Ashes, the KFC BBL and Weber WBBL, The Hundred, the Caribbean Premier League plus a number of professional Indian T20 teams, along with more than 50 highly detailed official stadiums.

Career Mode
Follow the journey of your player from club cricketer to the international stage, developing your skills and growing your fanbase as you hone your craft to become the next big thing in cricket. Cricket 24 gives more control to the player in determining their destiny, becoming a short-form hero, focusing on the Test team, or trying to balance both on your way to cricketing stardom.

All new fielding
A complete overhaul of the fielding systems to provide the most realistic and responsive fielding controlsever seen in a cricket video game.

Cross Platform
Fully cross platform, play online against your friends and the world’s best players regardless of platform. Create and share custom content across different platforms including stadiums, players, teams and more with the academy."

It seems unjust that for so long, the second most watched sport in the entire world went without a video game, after Cricket 07 by EA sports, there was not a major cricket game until the Australian studio Big Ant Studios stepped up to the crease to come in and bat for the second biggest sport in the world. While lacking the polish of its heavy hitting American counter parts such as EA or 2K. Cricket 24 is a great sports game that is well worth the time of not only cricket fans, but sports fans as well.

This game appreciates that not everyone is a Cricket fanatic, so as well as being made for Cricket fans, it also remembers to still be accessible to those who aren’t. You can decide between arcade or simulation controls, or if you want to really tweak the finer details of how the game works by tampering with a vast multitude of sliders. There are sliders for every single aspect of the game, from the ai behaviour to the physics of the ball. This makes Cricket 24 and incredibly accessible game for all skill levels, which is important for a Cricket game, as the sport itself can be a difficult one to understand at first.

Whether you pick simulation or arcade, the batting is a joy, the noise of bat on ball sounds so solid and pure, and you can tell just from how you strike the ball how clean it was, and getting a thick edge into the slips sounds so realistic that it fills you with the same dread that it would in real life.

There are a wide variety of shots on the front and back foot that can be played, including the more unorthodox shots such as a reverse sweep, Big Ant have done their homework, and batting connoisseurs will enjoy the variety of shots on offer. While the animations can feel a little stiff, the physics of the ball and impact of the bat means that shots feel satisfying. Getting onto the backfoot in time for a surprise bouncer and hooking it round the corner is one of the best feelings I’ve experienced in a sports game. Equally, the feedback is good enough that you know when you haven’t made the right connection, hitting it too early is a self-imposed death sentence, suddenly all you can do is watch as your pathetically timed strike slowly arcs straight into the palms of extra cover.

The bowling feels equally fun, trying to find the perfect line and length is a great puzzle, and the ball, pitch and weather realistically contribute to the spin, speed and swing of the ball (if you want them to). The sound effects I mentioned earlier also enhance this experience, you can clearly hear the knick of an edge or the thump of the ball on the pads. You will need to listen for these as well as manually appealing is part of the game, which adds a fantastic and exciting bit of interactivity. Appealing for an LBW for it to be given out really makes you feel like a bowler, and the euphoria of a wicket after 10 overs of grinding a batter down feels incredibly rewarding. The wicketkeeper and slips will react to your deliveries as well, adding a flavourful form of immersive feedback, a ball that spins just past the batter’s edge and off-stump will be met with the collective groans of the surrounding fielders.

The accessibility, batting and bowling controls form strong pillars of gameplay that should be at the core of any sports game, Cricket 24 successfully replicates the mechanics of cricket, it might seem surprising but so many sports games forget to hit this important aspect (FIFA can sometimes feel too floaty and fast for a real game of football) however Big Ant nail the fundamentals here. The natural flow of cricket is also reflected accurately, breaking a long partnership or getting a couple of quick wickets can completely flip a game in its head, equally a grinding and attritional last stand by the lower order can salvage a situation that looked hopeless.

In true sports game fashion, there is also a career mode which allows you to start at grass roots level in some hilariously small teams, you can then get scouted and join your county team, until eventually you can play with the very best for your country. The promotion through the teams is fun and improving your stats provides a nice sense of progression, as well as the stats you can also feel your player get better, bowling becomes more precise, and batting becomes easier. You can also hit the gym in between games, to further increase your physical stats. Outside this option to go the gym, and the different teams you can play for, there isn’t much more depth, and career mode is essentially just an endless supply of cricket matches, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you want from a career mode.

Once you do reach the heights of international cricket, you will have the honour of playing alongside fully licensed players, Big Ant have done well attaining licenses for players from some of the world’s biggest cricketing nations as well as over 50 official stadiums. Back with their first entry into the cricket world in Don Bradman cricket 2014 there was minimal licensing, ten years down the line and they have improved this markedly and Cricket 24 is a remarkable evolution of their cricket IP. Carribean Premier League teams, English county teams, Australian Big Bash teams and even The Hundred teams are all fully licensed, there are a wealth of real life teams and players to play alongside or against.

To fill in the rest of the roster, you can use the game’s “Cricket Academy”, a staple of all the Big Ant cricket games, which allows you to download players, teams, stadiums and even bats. Not only does this mean you can download any missing real life players, you can also download legacy teams and players if you want to play with old favourites. It is worth noting that the community creations can be somewhat glitch prone, I downloaded an updated version of English bowler Ollie Robinson, and it didn’t download his head, so I accidentally played an entire test match with a terrifying headless bowler. Finding the good creations can also prove challenging as the sorting and filtering tools aren’t very intuitive.

There are glitches present in the rest of the game as well, and they can let the game down somewhat. Fielders can behave unpredictably, performing weird behaviours such as picking up the ball and freezing forever, soft locking the game in progress. Batters can stand outside their crease for no particular reason and give away non sensical wickets (although this has happened in real life, the frequency that it happens in Cricket 24 is unrealistic and frustrating). Sometimes you can get caught in an unjust manner, as fielders can contort and snap in sometimes frightening ways to take a catch that would be impossible in reality. A lot of these glitches can cost you wickets and runs which can detract from the experience. The graphics can also leave a little to be desired. Big Ant clearly put a lot of time and money into the gameplay and licenses, however this means that the graphics suffer as a result.

Despite some slightly dated graphics and a few glitches ,the gameplay and wealth of game modes make for an incredibly fun sports game, and if you have any fellow cricket loving friends, this game is an absolute hoot with two players, taking turns on the bowling and trying to build batting partnerships together is a fantastic multiplayer experience, and the online modes and active player base means it’s easy to find players online. The gameplay and the many licenses this game has to offer aids in creating the best cricket gaming experience ever made in a video game to date, and despite the dated graphics and occasional glitches, this game is a must buy for any cricket fan.

Zatu Score

Rating

  • Graphics
  • Multiplayer
  • Story (Career Mode)
  • Originality

You might like

  • Solid gameplay
  • Lots of licenses
  • Extremely accessible and customisable

Might not like

  • Dated Graphics
  • Glitchy
  • Simple career mode